Egypt's civilians should run military

For the millions of Egyptians celebrating President Mohamed Morsi’s ouster, the military’s move promises a brighter future. Yet the laudable democratic goals of Egypt’s twin revolutions will remain beyond reach so long as the officers continue to be the source of power and authority in the political system.

Was it a coup? This question has fueled a raging debate online — one that carries legal implications for the U.S. government — but it misses the point. Since July 1952, when the Free Officers under Gamal Abdel Nasser pushed King Farouk from power, the armed forces have dominated Egypt’s political system — a fact that Wednesday’s dramatic events only reinforced.

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As President Barack Obama stated after the military ousted Morsi, “the best foundation for lasting stability in Egypt is a democratic political order,” but Egyptians will not have a full democracy until they bring the military under civilian control. It will be a long and arduous process, but it is also one of the few promising democracy-promotion projects the United States can help Egypt undertake.

Egypt’s military has a long history of dabbling in politics — but not as much as one might think. After 1952, it never needed to undertake a coup, because the political system the Free Officers built was rigged to favor the interests of the armed forces. The fact that Nasser and his successors Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak were military officers established an informal, but critical link between the presidency and the armed forces. This stabilized the political system — the military simply had no need to intervene in politics. There were moments of tension between the armed forces and Egypt’s presidents, but overall the system worked.

When Morsi pushed top commanders from office in August 2012, observers speculated that the move tilted the balance of power in favor of civilians. Yet it was not to be. Morsi’s showdown with the senior command was really the story of a younger, ambitious group of officers, unhappy with the way the transition from Mubarak to Morsi was handled, seizing the opportunity to oust their superiors.

This new group, led by Maj. Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, never took orders from Morsi. Instead, the military relieved itself of the burden of governing Egypt but nevertheless retained its economic interests, control over its own personnel, prerogatives in national security decision-making and its overall authority — and enshrined those privileges in Morsi’s deeply flawed and unpopular constitution.

As they craft a new grand political bargain, Egypt’s new civilian leaders will need the fortitude to resist the military’s penchant for self-dealing. And the United States can help. But Washington should not lecture Egyptians on writing a constitution or dispatch high-priced contractors from USAID. Instead, the Obama administration should do what it did not do during Egypt’s previous constitution-drafting exercise: speak out clearly about the importance of civilian control of the military. Plenty of Egyptians will tell Washington to mind its own business, but while Obama once warned that the United States should be humble in the face of changes in the Middle East, it should never, as he forcefully declared, abdicate its values.

Egypt will also have to change its military education system. Many observers hope that a younger generation of officers — some, including Sisi, with U.S. training — have a different view of the world than their superiors and thus will want to help forge a more democratic society. But the Obama team should have no illusions about the military’s determination to protect its own pride of place.